Deploying Flask to Apache

Out of the box, the flask framework comes with its own development server, so far I've only used this but eventually I would be deploying it onto my main server running apache. I decided I needed to make sure I could get this working without too much trouble so I made a simple Hello World application along the lines of the main flask tutorial.

I uploaded it to a folder on my server and SSH'd in to start configuring things. I'd already set up a sub domain to use and pointed it at the server too.

I found that the flask documentation for setting up with Apache made the assumption that you'd already worked with WSGI applications and just needed the flask way so it took a bit of digging and re-reading.

First, I created a new shell-less user to run my app as. I could have just used the Apache user (www-data), but I wanted to be able to distinguish files that had been molested by my flask app:

create a new user without a home directory:

$ useradd -M flask

remove shell:

$ usermod -s /bin/false flask

Finally, lock the account to prevent logging in:

$ usermod -L flask

I also added the user to the Apache www-data group. This makes it easier to work with file permissions later as I can keep ownership of them with my own user, but allow the www-data group access.

Initially I didn't think I needed to import the path to the app as I assumed it would be started in its own directory, however, I realised later that mod_wsgi starts apps with the same base directory a Apache, which in my case was the system root.

Finally I created a new Apache VirtualHost config in /etc/apache2/sites-available:

Adding the WSGIScriptReloading directive meant that any time I made changes to my application files, I could simply $ touch flaskTest.wsgi and the app would restart with changes applied. I even found a python-based implementation of touch that I could use if I wanted to be able to restart the app from within the app!

As mentioned above, by default, the application starts as if it were called from the server root. The WSGI Documentation gave me the extra home option for the WSGIDaemonProcess directive, which changes that to wherever you want it.

I had to make one final change to the configuration file from the documented example, which was to specify the port for the VirtualHost *:80. Without this it over-rode my other virtual hosts and everything ended up pointing to the same place!